In response to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science have released spoken and textual data they've compiled on Haitian Creole to help developers create translation tools needed by relief workers.

Academic researchers can now apply for free access to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud services. The company's Research division announced the program Thursday in a joint press conference with the National Science Foundation (NSF), which will act as gatekeeper between researchers and the service.

SpringSource wants the Eclipse community to take over ongoing development of its dm Server. The chief commercial sponsor of the open source Spring Framework project announced on Tuesday that a proposal to make dm Server part of the Eclipse Runtime Project had already been submitted to Eclipse.org under the project name "Virgo."

Microsoft this week said it will let developers who use Eclipse-based IDEs integrate their Java and PHP applications with the latest versions of Windows, Silverlight, and the forthcoming Azure cloud platform.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 became available to MSDN subscribers Monday, and general availability is expected Wednesday, Oct. 21. The Beta 2 release was announced during the kickoff keynote this week at the Microsoft SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.